06 September 2007

Visual thinking exercises at Overlap

This summer I led some visual thinking exercises at Overlap 07, a small gathering of design/business thinkers. The video above will give you a bit of a feeling for how visual thinking can make meetings and events more collaborative, conversational and engaging, and how visual thinking can spark creativity and insight.

12 comments:

Mike
said...

David,

Thank you for sharing this presentation. Nicely done. In today's environment a face-to-face event like this is a luxury. I am wondering if you, or anyone else here, has run across ideas on how to pull off a similarly effective event in a virtual collaboration environment. If yes, how?

In a virtual environment I think you have to treat things entirely differently.

Some examples:

1. Rather than getting everyone involved at the same time, try setting up a collaboration space where people can contribute on their own time, when it makes sense to them.

2. Set up email discussion groups and RSS feeds, so people can get "triggers" that move them to action (Facebook does this very well). People are generally better at reacting to triggers than being proactive.

3. Of course sometimes you need to bring people together for "same-time" interaction, like a conference call and/or online meeting. in such cases it's best to keep the group small and focused, with a clear goal for the meeting, and keep the meeting to 90 minutes or less (preferably less).

I love this. I really would love to find a way for us to connect and talk about some elements of what I do with the various aspects of my 8 Minute Ripple and what you and your team do. I just have this feeling that our paths have crossed for a reason.

We have put up a new video re: The 8 Minute Ripple by the way if you want to check it out at www.ripplecentral.com --- 8 Minute Ripple tab.

It happened to be really interested in social dynamics and group dynamics as you presented in your video. Writting for the purpose of tagging it is not only a way of synthesizing or visual thinking generators, but the way you mobile your thoughts! So papers and artifacts can prove to be path oriented when it comes to numerous posts on the wall! As a matter of fact, beyond collaborative thinking and creativity, better say expression, such artifacts can be proven to be conversational insights indeed!